The Curious Case of Antonio Rosmini

On the Importance of Intellectual Charity

In the apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam (which I’ve written about in more detail here and here), in which Pope Francis offers his vision of the discipline of theology, he insists that theologians must emphasize the sapiential dimension of theology, by which he means that the truth explored by theology is not something merely abstract and intellectual, but something that is lived out. In making this point, he cites the 19th-century Italian Catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini, who proposed the notion of “intellectual charity,” which means, in Francis’s words, in a certain sense “it is impossible to know the truth without practicing charity.”

This is hardly a novel idea. The medieval theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus, for example, argued that theology is a practical science, in the Aristotelian sense of a body of knowledge aimed at action, because its purpose is to enkindle love in the believer. Likewise, in the opening paragraphs of his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI explored the reciprocal relationship between charity (or love) and truth.

Francis’s citation of Rosmini is nevertheless intriguing, for reasons I will explain shortly. But first, who was Antonio Rosmini? He was born in 1797 in the town of Rovereto, which was at the time located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today is in the northern Italian province of Trentino. Rosmini came to Italy for his studies and was ordained a diocesan priest in 1821. In 1828, he established the Institute of Charity, a religious community of priests and laymen dedicated to educating youth and acts of charity, and the community’s constitution was approved by Pope Gregory XVI in 1838. Meanwhile, Rosmini had also become an accomplished philosopher. His most important work, A New Essay Concerning the Origin of Ideas, was published in 1830, and other works followed, although some were not published during his lifetime. In this work, Rosmini tried to harmonize the Catholic philosophical tradition with post-Kantian philosophy.

Blessed Antonio Rosmini

By the 1840s, Rosmini had become involved in the movement to unify Italy, and his writing turned to political philosophy. Rosmini proposed that Italy be unified under the leadership of the pope, and for a time he was an ally of Pope Pius IX. Rosmini’s call for reforms in the Church, however, such as greater participation by the laity in the liturgy, better education for clergy, the end of episcopal appointments by secular governments, and the need for the Church to live a simpler lifestyle, led to his works being placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1849. In 1854, however, a year before Rosmini’s death, his works were removed from the Index.

That was not the end of the story, however. In 1887, Pius IX’s successor Leo XIII condemned forty propositions drawn from Rosmini’s works in metaphysics and epistemology in the bull Post obitum (which is hard to find online, but can be found on p. 475 of Denzinger’s The Sources of Catholic Dogma). Rosmini, along with others like the Italian philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti and the Dutch philosopher Casimir Ubaghs, came to be associated with the term “ontologism,” a system of thought based on the idea that an intuitive knowledge of God is necessary for all other knowledge, which was rejected by the Church in the second half of the 19th century. For a good summary of the 19th-century debate over ontologism, see chapter 5 of Gerald McCool’s Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century.